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Women's Rights News

Wilson Center Scholar, Juan Carlos Garzón, is quoted in an article on 180.com about the judicial changes that have occurred under Guatemalan Attorney General, Claudia Paz y Paz. The article analyzes whether the changes that have been made will continue once Paz y Paz steps down at the end of 2014. This article is in Spanish.

Angela Kocze, a leading Hungarian Roma rights activist and scholar, is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor with the Department of Sociology at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, as well as a Research Fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

The culmination of a large scale project investigating the role of women in the media in Pakistan, Uks has launched the report "Who's Telling Our Story" to explore the issues raised by their findings. Asia Program Director Robert Hathaway contributed a message of support.

Northeast Asia associate Shihoko Goto discusses how Prime Minister Shinzo Abe could expand his economic policy plans to boost the power of Japanese women in the workplace in the Japan Times. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2013/05/22/commentary/why-abenomics-hurts-women/#.UcuFpJz3Mno

On June 4, 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. As the Wilson Center celebrates the centennial of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, the Women in Public Service Project reflects on the advances made for women’s rights under the Wilson administration.

Jane Harman, director, president & CEO of the Wilson Center, is pleased to announce the members of the 2013-2014 fellowship class. The 21 fellows, most of whom are expected to start September 2013, include scholars and practitioners from the United States, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, the Netherlands, and New Zealand.

Ina Merdjanova, former Southeast Europe policy scholar, releases her latest monograph Rediscovering the Umma. "Ina Merdjanova discusses the conditions and role of Islam in relation to post-Ottoman nation-building, the communist period, and post-communist developments in the Balkans, focusing in particular on the remarkable transformations experienced by Muslim communities after the end of the Cold War. Amidst multiple structural and cultural transitions, they sought to renegotiate their place and reclaim their Islamic identities in formally secular legal and normative environments, mostly as minorities in majority-Christian societies." (Oxford University Press)

Development on the African continent has gone “high tech.” Using the Internet, mobile devices, and other tools unavailable to previous generations, young people, particularly women, are leading the way in finding innovative ways to unleash technology to solve problems large and small. During a recent conference conducted by the Wilson Center’s Africa Program, we spoke with three front line leaders of a movement that has transformational potential.

Responding to the Muslim Brotherhood, leading female activists are charging that Islam actually guarantees women wide-ranging rights–and that the largest Islamist movement in the Arab world merely wants to maintain male dominance. In March, the Brotherhood had warned that U.N. passage of a draft declaration on violence would lead to society’s “complete disintegration.” It said that the declaration contradicted Islamic principles by allowing women to have full sexual freedom and marry outside their faith while cancelling the need for a husband’s consent to “travel, work, or use of contraception.”

In early January, King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz appointed 30 women to Saudi Arabia’s Shura Council, which had been an all-male assembly. Fifteen women in nine Arab countries, from Morocco to Egypt and Iraq, reacted to the appointment, and remarks by controversial cleric Ahmed al Abdulqader ― who reportedly called the new council members “prostitutes” on Twitter. Nearly all of the women saw the appointment as an important step in the struggle for women’s rights in the kingdom. But several stipulated that the appointment would make little difference if other reforms are not enacted.